Amersham Beyond Group - 7th Oct 2021

Meeting Notes on Creative Photography and Photo-Art
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spb
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Joined: Tue Mar 25, 2008 7:04 pm

Amersham Beyond Group - 7th Oct 2021

Post by spb » Sat Oct 09, 2021 10:59 am

The meeting was held in-person for the first time in 18 months. There is no recording - you had to be there!

MONTHLY CHALLENGES
All our Challenge images can be seen at Amersham Beyond Group on Flickr.

For APS Members only, this month's images are also available for viewing and commenting here.
Please spend time viewing and commenting on the images - this is our primary source of feedback at the moment. Authors are also encouraged to provide commentary on their creations.

Many members had sent apologies as they were having a late holiday so, with about 25 members in attendance, social distancing was not a problem.

We viewed the current Challenges which are;

#22 NOSTALGIA


#23 TEXTURE

and the latest;

#24 SUMMER UNLOCKED


It would be fair to say that the latest challenge proved .. er .. challenging. Images of summer were plentiful but summer unlocked was harder to illustrate. Despite this, many enjoyable and creative attempts were submitted. There are another couple of months to give it a go.

The next Challenge is;

#25 MINIMALISM

For those who couldn’t be at the meeting this theme was illustrated by images from two sources that you can see for yourself;

- it transpires that there has been an annual international minimalist competition since 2019 with a $2000 prize. See Minimalist Photography Awards. Click on the Winners tab for galleries of successful images from the past. We agreed that their criteria for minimalism was probably wider that we would choose so you might discount a few of the busier images.
- Also in image databases such as Flickr a search for 'minimal' or 'minimalism' will reveal no end of ideas.

I liked the relevant quote from Mick Moore of the British Journal of Photography – on the judging panel for the MPA; …artists who refuse to be overwhelmed by the ‘visual noise’ that surrounds them and instead find those moments of poetry, order and the submline…

This Challenge was enthusiastically received by members and, as a bonus, the subject could be more acceptable in APS monthly competions than most.

With little content in our minimal images, attention to composition, colour and tone will be paramount.

NEXT MEETING

The next meeting will be held on 4th November 2021. With a little luck we might even meet in the new Chiltern Lifestyle Centre which is due to open on the 1st November.

BACK OF BEYOND - DIARIES


Epson Printer Support. Although my new Epson SC-P900 has been great, It had a big problem of my own making over the summer. Whilst printing 1.2M long banner prints for the APS exhibition (without the aid of a roll printer adapter) I left the room for a minute only to return to find that the loose end of the sheet had also been fed into the printer. What I should have done was immediately pull out the power lead. What I actually did was press Cancel. This resulted in another 30 seconds of increasingly laboured printing, error messages and bad paper jamming noises. There is no way to release, reverse or open the roller mechanism and brute force was the only way to extract all remains of the paper. After this, my shiny new weeks-old £1000+ printer refused to feed any paper and generated a curated selection of serious error messages. In short, disaster.

Now - I have been damning of poor Epson support and their disdain for their customers reported by our members over many years. Time to give this a test. A call to their support line quickly resulted in an appointment for a home visit by a third party authorised repairer. They arrived, stated that these printers were virtually impossible to repair in the field and without even switching it on, promptly swapped it out for a pre-prepared and initialised brand new printer! They said that this was the policy and pretty much whatever the problem and however stupid the owner (run over by a truck, dropped out of a window etc) this would be done so long as it was still in the guarantee period.
They therefore strongly recommended considering an extended warranty. Whilst this is not cheap, two extra years roughly equates to the price of a set of inks, so it may be a prudent investment... as would a roll-print adapter!


Cheers, Steve

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